


Forget

by tfm



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Coda, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 21:09:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16436813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tfm/pseuds/tfm
Summary: She drinks to remember, and she drinks to forget.





	Forget

She drinks to remember, and she drinks to forget.

To remember what a normal human is supposed to feel like – not the cold empty shell of a person that she’s become.

To forget the things that she sees, the things that she experiences, every time she shakes the hand of a child that has lived well beyond their years.

She thinks about how alcohol usually makes her feel; happy, and exuberant, and yes, maybe a little bit flirty.

Today, Theo Crain should feel sad. She should feel the emptiness in her life now that Nell has gone. She should feel the anger at the way her sister had died. She should feel dark, and lonely, and afraid of the world.

She feels nothing.

It’s a nothingness that had consumed when she had touched Nell’s forehead. When she had tried to find out the answer to the question that had consumed if not all of them, then at least Luke and their father. Had it really been suicide, or was it Hill House that had killed Nell (the same way it had killed their mother, her father would have said)?

The lights go out, and Theo feels nothing.

Is this, she wonders, what death – what real, inescapable death feels like? Forget ghosts, or afterlives, or reincarnation; just cold, empty, nothingness.

There’s someone else in there with her, and she reaches in the dark, not seeing who it is, just craving some form of human contact, craving any sort of feeling, even if it belongs to someone else.

The lights come on, and still she cannot see, because she is still in the darkness. 

What a terrible, human thing it is, to feel.

Skin brushes against skin. His hand is against her arm, and he must see the look in her eyes; the look of someone that is utterly lost, utterly forlorn. She still does not see him, but she feels the overwhelming rush of emotion, emotion that she can’t quite figure out whether it belongs to her, or to him.

She loves Kevin like a brother, but not once in a million years has she ever been attracted to him like that. Not least of all because she swings very far in the opposite direction. Sometimes, on her darker sort of days, she wonders what he sees in Shirley. Then, she hates herself for feeling that, for thinking that.

She doesn’t even realise that she’s kissing him, until he pushes her away. His shame hits her like a sledgehammer, but the look on his face isn’t disgust, or contempt, but concern. The concern is fleeting, and quickly changes as the door opens. 

His hand pulls away, and the shame that she had thought was his is still there. She can also feel the nausea, from the alcohol from the approximately seven thousand drinks she’s already had today, and the grief that she’d thought she’d lost.

Kevin runs after Shirley, to try to explain – how, Theo doesn’t know. She cannot even begin to think how she would explain this to Shirley. Shirley, who, once she gets an idea in her head, refuses to think, or do, or feel otherwise, will never let her explain.

She goes to the bathroom, and vomits. It’s been that sort of day. Her head hurts, and her stomach hurts, and the shame and the humiliation of the evening’s events have left her feeling emotionally wrecked.

But it’s better than feeling nothing at all.


End file.
